Networking architectures have grown increasingly complex in communications environments. In addition, the augmentation of clients or end users wishing to communicate in various network environments has caused many networking configurations and systems to respond by adding elements to accommodate the increase in networking traffic and the various enhancements that have been provided by numerous communicative platforms. In recent years, a series of protocols and architectures have been developed in order to accommodate a diverse group of end users having various needs.
Session border controllers (SBCs) generally use media relays in order to provide virtual private network (VPN)-interconnect, network address translation (NAT) traversal, topology hiding, and other functionalities. They provide their own (proprietary) media optimization mechanism for ensuring that relays are not inserted when they should not be.
An alternative approach to these operations is for endpoints to support an interactive connectivity establishment (ICE) methodology that makes use of a traversal using relay NAT (TURN) protocol, and simple traversal of UDP over NATs (STUN) protocol, and to have TURN and STUN servers in the network. There are two related problems that these arrangements implicate. The first problem relates to how to ensure that these two approaches are able to inter-work in a system that provides both SBCs and that has endpoints that support ICE/TURN/STUN. The second problem relates to media optimization in systems where some endpoints support ICE/TURN/STUN and others do not.
Accordingly, the ability to provide an effective mechanism to properly process, coordinate, and direct communications that implicate SBCs offers a significant challenge to network operators, component manufacturers, and system designers alike.